Dear Other Grandma

you won't remember not getting this

It’s been quite a while since we last spoke and even longer since you remember we spoke, you know, on account of the dementia. Well, maybe you don’t remember.

You outlived everyone else in your generation, including (to no one’s surprise) your drunk of a husband by a solid 20 years, so well done. That’s certainly a way to get revenge. I wish I could say more, but I honestly know so little.

Other

I feel bad about the whole Other Grandma bit, but I didn’t really know you as well as Grandma Prime. In a lot of ways you were very hard to get close to. If Prime was loud, gregarious, wanting to befriend anyone and everyone, then you were the opposite, why are there so many people, why are they so loud, when can I go home again. And in so many ways, I’m more like you (and Mom) than Prime (and Dad).

It’s a difference, one that I don’t think I’ll ever understand, blah blah introverts, extroverts, so on and so forth. Same old tropes you’ve heard a thousand times. And yeah, it’d be great to just say that’s just how you me we are. Accept and move on. But it’s never that simple or easy. Unsurprisingly, there is all this social pressure to be sociable. Go out, do the thing, go to the happy hour, talk to the people… and they’re not even wrong.

Why not do the thing, go to the place, exchange the bodily fluids. You might even like it. But even ignoring the social judgement of sociability (or lack thereof), this shit matters. You are the perfect example of why it matters, you and I never connected. Our mutual reluctance to make attachments ensured that. Add a couple thousand miles between us and it became a damn near certainty.

Like many things I feel like I can only hope to accept it. Were you able to?

Holes

Years before the book Holes and even more years before I would learn how to write my way out of dialectical holes, I spent a summer on your farm digging holes. Not for any clear purpose, just… to dig. It’s very possible that this was the happiest I have been, will ever be. We’d spend the whole day digging, the adults would walk by and leave comments.

Whatcha kids doing?

-Digging a hole!

Ok then.

They’d come through again couple hours later.

Jeez that’s getting pretty big… make sure you fill that back in when you’re done.

-Sure thing boss!

There’s a phenomenon that happens with holes, for whatever reason when you go to fill a hole back up with the dirt you dug out of it, you always come up short. You’d start heaving the pile of dirt you created next to your hoIe.. into your hole, having profound thoughts like wow filling up a hole is so much easier than digging one out. You’re filling and filling and at some point you’re looking at this three quarter filled holed and looking at the grass poking up through your dirt pile and thinking something doesn’t add up here. There’s no way there’s enough dirt left to fill this hole, and it’s not like we were trying to pack it there either, there just wasn’t enough dirt.

Needless to say we had to go find dirt elsewhere to make up the difference.

Much later, I learned that digging holes is a surprisingly common urge among young boys.

“There seems to be a peculiar interest in digging a hole big enough to contain three or four boys, and then covering it up and concealing it so that no one can find it but the ones who dug it. Here much time is spent in hiding from people, eating fruit and other food pilfered from the pantry, etc.”

R.A. Archer - American Journal of Psychology 1910

This Archer fellow was damn right. There are few things more satisfying than building an elaborate hideout for you and your friends.

There are so many things you can do in a hole. You can sit in it, you can eat snacks in it (as mentioned in scholarly article), you can look at the jar of potato bugs you collected earlier that day, you can plan your next hole, you can build tunnels to connect the different holes you’ve dug! I’m getting really excited just thinking about it. I think this is what drugs feel like. Just kidding I know what drugs feel like. Don’t tell mom.

Patterns

Legend has it that you came from a Polish family in a part of Poland that would become part of the Soviet Union. As these things go, nobody asked the people that were living there at the time. Long story short, congratulations you are now Russian, your kids are Russian, they now primarily speak Russian, they’re now culturally Russian, you’re welcome. Пожалуйста и спасибо.

Now I’m following a similar pattern, moving from another country at a young age. English becoming my main language, culture.

How did you ever make sense out of this? I imagine in your days, things were very “where is your blood from?” and these days it’s more “how do these lived experiences contribute to the multi-faceted individual that is you?” and “what whitening strips do you use?”.

I’m reminded of this bit by George Carlin about how PTSD is a euphemism for what they called shell shock in WWI. I wonder if your generation had a non-euphemistic term for identity crisis.

I wish I had something funny to say here, but I don’t. So I’ll just say that I think it would have been nice if we could have been friends.

Sincerely,

Probably grandson